The Willow Field

by William Kittredge

  After most of an hour, Rossie pulled the hobbles off Margie's blue mare, tightened his cinch, shook down his riata, and went out to rope, and Bill Sweet and Wilson Bart got down to take their turn at wrestling the calves amid the pungent smoke, bloodying their hands. Dusty and sweaty in the heat, they drank from burlap water bags brought by Gertrude Bart and sharpened their own knives. The little crew was at it in such shifts until the last snot-slinging, young heifer was dragged to the fire, wrestled there, and branded, and the herd was turned loose to drift into the hills beyond the fenced pasture.

  As the men opened bottles of home-brewed beer, and the Barts set up to grill steaks over the remnants of the branding fire, Margie came rattling and jostling down the road in an Army surplus Jeep. Another woman was with her.

  “You drink up that first bottle of whiskey?” Margie called to Rossie, then she turned without waiting for an answer and shouted to the other woman in a voice loud enough for Rossie to hear, “Sister Hutchison, here's a fellow who's sure hoping I brought another bottle.”

  When they climbed out of the Jeep, Rossie saw that Sister Hutchison was tall and lank, with eyes so dark as to be ebony. She wore jagged-off trousers that just reached the top of her lace-up boots, and her black-and-gray hair was swirled into a French coil at the back of her head.

  Margie marched off to help setting up the food, and Rossie was left with Sister Hutchison.

  “Sister, you some kind of Catholic?”

  “Some kind of twin. My brother died in Paris. He was Brother and I was Sister, growing up in Malta. Can you and I eat together?”

  So she and Rossie sat alongside each other on a punky cottonwood log. They sipped at the whiskey bottle when it came passing and cut at steaks and spooned up beans.

  “I've been on these prairies since I was twenty-three,” she said. “There's no other place for me.”

  Her husband had died amid hedgerows in the French countryside just a few days after the Allied invasion. Staying on, she managed the grazing properties they had bought together, and she'd made ends meet teaching lower grades in a schoolhouse like the Exeter School, winter after winter, until the nearby children left and her one-room school-house was closed.

  “I never remarried because frankly I never encountered a man I'd want to wake up alongside of on a regular basis. That's what I say. Truth is, a lot of the mornings, I'd take anybody who had anything to say.”

  Rossie wondered why she had picked him to eat with and where this was going. “And Brother?” he asked.

  “Oh, poor Brother.”

  He had been a schoolboy legend with his singing voice, and gone from Malta to New York with a scholarship at the Juilliard School and then chased his love of Baroque music to France in the late 1940s, where he'd died of whiskey and narcotics. “Nobody ever thought it would come to that. We never do. For years I didn't want to think about what I missed by not going to find my brother. In this country a girl wants to escape. But a woman finds herself located. I was a very young woman but I was located. Maybe, over much.”

  At that she stood, wiping her mouth on a white handkerchief. “Good talking with you,” she said. “I wanted to talk to you about traveling. Margie told me you've traveled. I might have gone to Paris and saved Brother, but I didn't, I stayed here.”

  “Well, neither one of us has been to Paris.”

  She turned back to him. “We could have some drinks on your way home. Tomorrow or the next night. You could stay over at the ranch. That would cause a scandal but it wouldn't be like we were losing our heads and going to the Mint Motel in Malta.” She held his eyes, unflinching.

  Quick as that, the ranch or the Mint Motel. “I someways hope you won't,” she said. “Our lives are quiet out here.”

  “I figured it out,” Rossie said. “You remind me of my mother.”

  Sister's features lit up, abruptly amused. “There you are. The perfect getaway line. Do I sound like I'm talking mother to you?”

  “It's the hair. My mother used to coil her hair just like you got it.”

  “Floats down to my waist. I brush it and see myself in the mirror and coil it up again. Aren't we the beauties?”

  In twilight, the men caught their horses and rode off toward evening dusk. They would get home under moonlight. After Margie and Sister Hutchison drove off in the Jeep, Rossie and Bill Sweet were left with their bourbon by their fire. “You going to visit with Sister?”

  “You mean shacking up? How'd you get that idea?”

  “You see it. Anybody out here is bound to be curious about people from your end of the world. They wonder what they're missing.”

  “Don't think I'm going to be visiting Sister,” Rossie said.

  But in the night he imagined a dark, simple motel room in Malta and thought of Sister Hutchison naked, her breasts floating as she lifted her arms to brush at her hair. Ever so quietly he pulled at his cock and came onto his belly and thought that's that, one more time he'd been true to Eliza in fact if not in spirit. He again wondered if trueness mattered or if it was just a habit he'd taught himself so as to not, as Lemma had said those years go, fuck up his deal.

  Driving home, he detoured over to Choteau country along the Rockies Front, for a look at the cliffs of the Chinese Wall up in the mountains.

  “You were right, getting on the road was good for me,” he told Eliza when he got home. “People over there don't like to think about living anywhere else. Makes you realize the sun don't set in your ass. I wondered what if you and me walked into the high country and stayed for a summer of grizzlies and shitting in the woods and eating nothing but trout and berries?”

  “At our age,” Eliza said, “people get tired and think new country is an answer.” She sounded worn out rather than amused by his notion.

  IN JUNE OF THE NEXT YEAR, ELIZA ASKED ROSSIE IF HE'D noticed that Veronica was in love. Just out of high school, his daughter had transmuted into a lean, suntanned creature with contours of the kind men joked about in the barbershop. While the physical changes were obvious, Rossie had missed the signs, whatever they were, of love.

  “Not much,” he said.

  “Your daughter, you should have. Don't be surprised if Lionel shows up this evening.”

  The once-upon-a-time Mr. Bitterroot indeed came knocking, wearing a sweat-stained denim shirt with the sleeves torn off to show his thick arms with their veins.

  “It's about Ronnie,” Lionel said.

  Rossie didn't follow.

  “Veronica.”

  “You caught up with her?” Rossie said.

  “It was me,” Lionel said.

  Veronica's dark eyes were guarded when she came in from the pickup. “Lionel has a master's degree. I get to sink my own ship, and nobody can stop me. That's how it is with daughters.” She smiled.

  “This Bitterroot is just right,” Lionel said, as if that remark might heal the moment. “All the stars at night, with the lights off.”

  “Sounds like it worked for you,” Rossie said.

  He didn't come off his high horse until days later when Eliza pointed out that he, Rossie, had in true fact located himself in the world in exactly the same way.

  “You caught up with a girl,” she said, “and here you are, years later, puffed up like Daddy Warbucks.”

  “Veronica is the one who's puffed up.”

  Eliza smiled into her knitting. “They'll be married. Remember? I was pumped up. That didn't bother you. Congratulate your daughter and shut your mouth.”

  He hadn't bothered to look at Veronica, except with the attentive-ness he ordinarily devoted to horses, as a form of solace. It hadn't crossed his thoughts that his blood girl might be lusting for the touch and stink of a man. He had never been jealous of Eliza and Charlie Cooper, and he had thought, for reasons he didn't understand, that covetousness wasn't a bone that had mattered in him. But the idea of Veronica bedding that boy sat like a twittering bird in his mind.

  “She was yours,” Eliza said. “Now, she's not. You act like you
've lost a possession. You'll want to cure that inclination. You're disappointed with her when it's you that caused the trouble. Learn to be happy for her.” She smiled. “It might take a while.”

  After the wedding in the Hamilton courthouse, Eliza gave Veronica title to the garden acreage and the orchard and lent Lionel the money to buy a double-wide, New Moon trailer house that he had set up on a concrete foundation at the high end of that property. He worked at developing his roadside nursery business and specialized in barnyard construction and European, raised-bed gardening for the cold climate.

  At the Cliff House that autumn, the organic gardeners were swamped by a massive harvest and sold pumpkins and squash around the valley by the pickup load. Teddy called them “Lionel and the Lord's enthusiasts.” Eliza wouldn't hear such talk.

  “Who would have guessed that you and Rossie would make a pair, with your sarcasm? The place is flowering. Look to the sweetness in your sister's life. We should bless them.”

  “God save the gardener's wife,” Rossie said.

  Eliza looked away, trying cold-eyed anger but failing, smiling. “It's her life,” she said.

  From the pastoral island of Chiloé in southern Chile, the fields fenced by ten-foot hedges and wooden Catholic churches built tight as ships in the small towns, Corrie called and said she'd pledged to marry Benny Waxman, the archeologist who headed her research party.

  But marriage between Corrie and Benny Waxman didn't seem to be an issue when they flew north from Puerto Montt for Christmas in the Bitterroot. With eyelashes almost white against his tanned skin and a flippant way of tossing his hair, this Benny Waxman was a matched set with Corrie.

  Eliza shook her head. “They're not getting married. It's sport fucking all the way. They think nobody's looking.”

  Rossie asked Eliza if she was envious. “If you are,” he said, “I've got a cure.”

  At Christmas dinner with all the children present, he offered what would become his traditional toast “to our little circus.” But in secret he felt the show was Eliza's—a pissant notion, he knew.

  “He acts,” Teddy wrote in his journal that evening, “like a fat-assed worm in Eliza's bright apple.”

  By New Year's Day Teddy and Veronica were off again to lives with children of their own, and Corrie had gone back to Chile, following her archeologist.

  “What do you want next?” Rossie asked, after Eliza complained about what she called their “drooling aimlessness.”

  Eliza smiled. “Coming to terms with privilege. That's next.” She insisted that service was necessary and essential to long-term sanity, soothing and vital as breathing. “We fall to sleep breathing one another's odors and we're tranquil—like that.”

  This was pure Eliza, Lemma's girl paying heed to the notion that anxiety could be alleviated by chasing significance. She'd long ago told him that girls who rebel against dominating mothers end up mirroring them.

  Rossie wondered who Veronica, with her determined passivity, was mirroring. But he kept his tongue quiet and there evolved a standoff that lasted a week, until a former governor—a long-jawed, slick-skinned old man reputed to be dying—called and announced that he was coming over from Helena to “confab.” He was going to ask Rossie to run for governor of Montana. That, Eliza said, was “common knowledge among Democrats.”

  “Just keeping yourself entertained, aren't you?”

  “Always have,” she said. “Give us a smile.”

  “What a tin bitch you are.”

  “Damned right I am, little tin Jesus all the way. And I mean to call in my chips.”

  They slept that night in separate rooms, but in the morning she found Rossie reading the letters to the editor in the day-old Missoula newspaper.

  “You owe me,” she said.

  This was a rancorous beginning, so she shut up and began breaking eggs for omelets—three for him, two for her—mixing in a chopped handful of chanterelle mushrooms and spinach from their dinner the night before along with chopped ham.

  “You,” she said, tending the omelet pan. “You owe me and I owe you. We owe each other.”

  Rossie held his silence as she set his meal before him.

  “We'll do what we do,” she said. “Eat.”

  She should have shut herself up, and she knew it. Rossie was not evading responsibilities. He trained his horses to be confident and sensible. Rodeo ropers from California and Texas paid thousands to truck his animals off to Cheyenne and Pendleton. Multiple winners rode Benasco horses in calf-roping and bulldogging and steer-stopping events across America. Not to mention the succession of young men from the Indian settlements over the years who lived in the bunkhouse or camped in tepees among the aspen along Kanaka Creek. Those men had quieted their angers and gentled themselves while calming the horses that drifted through the willow fields.

  Nevertheless, she felt justified in thinking it wasn't enough to gentle horses in the morning and spend afternoons down at the county courthouse arguing over taxation and water rights with the other county commissioners. Horses were a sport, and though she'd never quite said such a thing to Rossie, she felt it was deadly ever to mistake games for a purpose. This was about more than Rossie. It was about her and her intentions, nurtured since her girlhood in Chicago.

  The ex-governor came. Over coffee, after the veal chops, he asked Rossie to think about running for office.

  “Let's be candid,” the old man said. “Your wife can afford it and working people trust you. You do fine work with horses. People this side of the mountains are confident you'd take care of jobs. We've had boys out asking questions. People would vote for you. In the party we're certain we can trust you. We need fresh blood. We think you're part of our future.”

  “Who ever claimed his wife could afford anything?” Eliza protested, smiling.

  “Dear, sweet Eliza,” the ex-governor said, “we're all liberals but not indecently naive. I know damned well this idea doesn't offend you.”

  “Proud you thought of me,” Rossie said, “but this hits me as a deal you boys and Eliza cooked up without asking me. A commissioner in the Bitterroot is one thing. Governor is another. I don't know a thing about the budgets or the national government except that I know we're pissing in the wind in Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson would think I was a joke in a big, white Stetson, doing a Tom Mix act and spreading bullshit. Besides, it's hard to think working people would vote for a man who got what he has from his wife.”

  “Sounds like Lyndon would love you, Ross. You won't lose, don't worry. There are plenty of people who know about issues. Governors hire them by the dozens. After the briefings, you'll know what they know.”

  “I never even graduated from high school.”

  The old man smiled. “You rose from the corrals, and voters will respond to that. Think it over. There's time. It's something you owe Montana.”

  “And me,” Eliza said. “Both of us, actually—me and Montana.”

  Days later, as Eliza gathered their breakfast plates, Rossie was still at his thinking.

  “You were proud to be asked,” she said, trying her old peacemaking smile. “I'm asking again, why not?”

  “There's nothing wrong with how things are, that's why not.”

  “There's a few things wrong. It used to be we fucked. It was you and me fucking like skunks.”

  “Skunks?”

  “Any time we got the idea. But that seems to be over. It's time for something else.”

  “Any time, like right now?” he said, grinning.

  Eliza shook her head. “No chance with this girl.”

  After he was gone off, Eliza thought of following him along the icy road to the barn but instead bathed and lay warmed and naked on their bed, lifted her knees and stroked at herself. Nearing her ecstasy she remembered the stars, each alone and individual, hundreds of stars above the sodded banks of the Bow River south of Calgary and Rossie coming into her and her excitement on a summer morning when she went with Rossie to watch a blooded mare called Louise sta
nd for a stud named Vernon. There was the squealing and rearing and futile kicking and heedless penetration followed by repose, horses quiet, neck to neck, before wandering away from each other as if stunned, and she and Rossie had without thought of anyone seeing coupled with each other on a ledge above the creek and then slept.

  When she was done, her thoughts drifted to wondering how long it would take for Rossie to comprehend what was being offered by those old men from Helena. He would come around or not. But then what? How to be old? What if she forgot about him down there in his corrals, if in her preoccupation with this question she left him behind?

  The bone-chilling and discontented weeks didn't offer much in the way of fresh snowfall. Day after day Eliza and Rossie retreated and came together as the early darkness began, sharing drinks and the television news in the kitchen while Eliza clattered around preparing their nightly sit-down dinner.

  At half past midnight on January 31, the North Vietnamese launched a sixty-seven-thousand-man offensive against the Da Nang air base and thirty-six cities, taking the war from the jungle to urban areas. At a quarter to three on that morning the American embassy in Saigon was invaded by a suicide squad. Despite the fact that the Viet-cong couldn't hold a single city, the Tet Offensive was a public relations nightmare. Seeing their troops confused, retreating, and dying on television, Americans began intuiting that chances of success in Vietnam might be misrepresented by Dean Rusk and Robert McNamara. When Eddie Adams witnessed the South Vietnamese national police chief firing a bullet into the head of a prisoner with bound hands, The New York Times ran the photo front page. Walter Cronkite returned from Vietnam to tell the nation that their leaders were lying. We are mired in a stalemate…. The only rational way out will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.